Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

his predecessor had insisted on its improbability on grounds of proper religion. I was curious to know what was the nature of such a Foundation? No one today, he said, speaks of orphans and orphanages, these terms are thankfully obsolete, but one can only suppose that a circumstance of this kind might account for the peculiarity of so untypical a boy. When I learned that at the Foundation the chief praisesong of their worship is cantillated in the language spoken by Our Lord, I invited him to have the run of my library, where he might find volumes of theological and historical appeal. He brightened at this, but only fleetingly. Unhappily his diffidence was such that he shrank from entering my study. Yet what Reverend Greenhill asked of me, Ned said, was impossible. To be seen in the company of a leper with a leper’s name? I was myself too much the target of nasty cracks.

In Ned’s tone, I should add, there was nothing of complaint or grievance. He spoke with simple matter-of-factness, whether improvised or not. And somehow I could not resist asking if he recalled that it was I who had dared to befriend Ben-Zion Elefantin: did he remember that? Oh, he said, passing your open door on my way for my hour with Reverend Greenhill, I once saw the two of you bent over some sort of board game, and of course like everyone else I knew the rowdies had you in their sights, as they had me, but I put it out of my mind. The truth is it gave me a twinge of guilt. I did badly that day with my Xenophon.

After this, I turned rather self-consciously away from this subject to a blander one, and when we shook hands and parted and I was back in my office, I requested one of the clerks to look up a certain Elijah Foundation and make a note of the results. In the end he found nothing; such an entity no longer exists, and why should it, after so many decades? And why is it plausible that Ned Greenhill’s recollection of words uttered a lifetime ago to a vulnerable child of ten should hold water? And besides, is it not likely that it was a different boy Reverend Greenhill spoke of all those years before? And not Ben-Zion Elefantin?

But for the rest of that day I was unaccountably thrown into an unusual dejection, and if not for the kind concern of my own good Peg (Miss Margaret Stimmer as she was then), I might not have recovered my spirits. Nor have I since met with Ned Greenhill.

*

August 9, 1949. For the last several hours I have been ruminating over what I have come more and more to think of as Ben-Zion Elefantin’s entreaty. How fragile it is, and yet how persuasive! My transcription, so called, of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s history continues to occupy my father’s cigar box, forbidden to any eye but my own. It will be plain to the excluded reader that here he will find himself at a disadvantage. And for good reason: my growing apprehension. Is Ben-Zion Elefantin’s testimony, if I may take it to be that, a wizardly act of my own deceit? His pleadings are the very marrow, and may I say the soul, of my memoir, and when I lift them out of their shelter (as I must shamelessly admit I am too often tempted to do) I am made heartsick, as by the hovering of a revenant. And sometimes, in these sluggish midafternoons when I am seized by an overpowering stupor, I seem to see my father’s cigar box elide into the pretty china dish where my mother kept the scarab ring she never wore.

*

August 13, 1949. Hideous. Horrible and hideous. I cannot cleanse my eyes of it. Hedda’s shriek, and then Amelia running through the corridors shouting for me to come, come, come! That thing, barely a man, dangling in the night from the lit chandelier with its head horribly loosened, the tongue bulging, the necktie and its yellow butterflies twisted tight around the throat, the glass beads and teardrops swaying and tinkling like harps

*

August 14, 1949. At three o’clock this afternoon, mindful of the time gap, I telephoned my son. Noon in Los Angeles. He was still asleep, I could not help myself, I have no one dear to me, how alone I am, I feel strangled by my own vagrant fears. I despised this man, I thought him infantile in his attachment, the close companion of a vandal, if not himself a vandal, the two of them a cabal of criminality. But to take his own life because he could not bear the grieving, what am I to make of this? My son is indifferent to all of it, the suicide of a stranger, but what of my own hurt, how can he not see it, the fickleness of life, the cryptic trail of the past (my father’s desertion of my mother), and what of his own futility? I often feel that my son grudges me his time, yet today he took me by surprise, showing no impatience, assuring me there was no intrusion and that anyhow he had lately been sleeping lightly, buoyed up by what was almost certain to become his breakthrough, and do I know who William Wyler is? Wyler himself, he said, not his assistant, promises to get to my treatment early next week, likes the basic idea, seems excited by it, and so forth and so on, and how many times have I been apprised of this mirage by my deluded son? The oasis is always over the next hill. And the next hill is always more of the same desert.

I am not a jealous man. As a person of lineage, and as the heir and partner of a highly reputable law firm, I have never had a reason to envy. Rather, throughout my career, others have envied me. My